A survey of evaluation platforms for ad hoc routing protocols: A resilience perspective

Keywords: Survey Resilience evaluation Fault and attack injection Ad hoc networks Experimental testbeds a b s t r a c t Routing protocols allow for the spontaneous formation of wireless multi-hop networks without dedicated infrastructure, also known as ad hoc networks. Despite significant technological advances, difficulties associated with the evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols under realistic conditions, still hamper their maturation and significant roll out in real world deployments. In particular, the resilience evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols is essential to determine their ability of keeping the routing service working despite the presence of changes, such as accidental faults or malicious ones (attacks). However, the resilience dimension is not always addressed by the evaluation platforms that are in charge of assessing these routing protocols. In this paper, we provide a survey covering current state-of-the-art evaluation platforms in the domain of ad hoc routing protocols paying special attention to the resilience dimension. The goal is threefold. First, we identify the most representative evaluation platforms and the routing protocols they have evaluated. Then, we analyse the experimental meth-odologies followed by such evaluation platforms. Finally, we create a taxonomy to charac-terise txperimental properties of such evaluation platforms. Despite being originally developed for military purposes , the unique properties of ad hoc networks make them very suitable for civilian and commercial purposes. These networks will open up new avenues across the full breadth of future information technologies. A diverse set of applications exploiting the ad hoc network communication paradigm in a number of different situations, are today a reality. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are typically used for monitoring and observing physical phenomena [1]. These networks have also been used for deploying communication and data networks in emergence situations, like in the hurricane Katrina [2] crisis, in 2006. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are another interesting example of ad hoc network. They are capable of providing affordable Internet access to little or isolated populations far away from big city centres [3]. In the future, it is expected that many other application domains will benefit from ad hoc networks, e.g., Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) [4] to enhance passengers comfort and safety, or aeronautical ad hoc networks [5] to increase the data rate of in-flight broadband Internet access. Routing protocols are the backbone of ad hoc networks. They create complete routes between every pair of nodes from the topology information they are able to perceive.